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Dans17's Trophies

Dans17's Archive

What Went Wrong:
– We started with 3 people and good ideas, but the ideas proved to ambitious and 1 person quit, so we only really started after about half the time had already passed.

– A lot of people thought our game was too hard. We can both beat it easily, along with a few other people, but most people struggled with it.

– The game is pretty short, which is partly why we wanted to make it so challenging. We didn’t end up with enough time to make the entire game that we had planned, so we had to settle for limiting the game to one area, instead of implementing a whole story with multiple areas.

– We didn’t have time to make custom audio. The sound effects actually turned out pretty well (we didn’t make them ourselves), but there was no music. For our game from the last competition we had time to make an entire custom soundtrack with multiple tracks. Here is our last game if you’re interested:http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=22050

What Went Well:

– The game is pretty well polished. Despite not being able to complete our entire idea, when we realized that we wouldn’t have time to add much more, we dedicated the last few hours to polishing what we already had.

– The mood turned out very well. We added flickering lights and eerie sound effects that really contributed to the creepy mood of the game. People have said our game is scary, and we’re glad to have been able to achieve that with simple looking enemies (shadows) and without adding any gore.

– Despite many people thinking it was too hard, we think the game mechanics themselves were actually pretty innovative. Many people did games with the idea of pressing a button to go into another world, but our game has a bar that shows how far into the other world you are and if it fills up you lose. This, along with the flashlight mechanic that drives the shadows away, makes for very interesting and unique game-play.

– There is a Nick Cage Easter egg somewhere in the game.

The Future

We had a good idea for this game and it turned well, but we would like to release a post-compo version sometime in the future. This would include many more areas and possibly some of the story that we didn’t add. The difficulty level would also be changed. Many people thought that the flashlight didn’t do much to stop the shadows even though it actually slows them down considerably. Therefore, we’ll try to make it FEEL as if the flashlight does more and possibly make it actually do a little more. With a bigger game we could also have more progressive difficulty, so that people would get used to using the flashlight in easy areas before it got to difficult. We’re also planning to add many other features like lit-up areas that would act as safe-zones and a lantern with limited uses that would drive away shadows if you are surrounded.

This is our first Ludum Dare as a group and all 3 of us are in High School. So far, we have mainly focused on the graphics and design and have yet to start our actual game play and scripting… but our graphics and design are coming along pretty well. This game is about the fictional inner world of our Earth. The protagonist is a geologist that travels to Paris in order to examine exquisite gems, only to stumble upon the source of these gems: the secret world beneath the surface.

So i got a lot of comments saying that my game was really hard and it IS meant to be that way because the point of the game is to find an easy, minimalistic, way of beating difficult levels. I understand now that it might be hard to grasp the concept, so i thought about making a walk-through but if i did that, the levels would actually be TOO easy. Therefore i decided to make this post with a hint for each level to make it easier to beat.

1. The green circle isn’t the only green thing in the level.

2. The game is programmed so that the character falls until ANY part of him touches gray.

This is my first Ludum Dare competition entry that i created on Scratch. I tried to make the game with an interesting interpretation of minimalism, so i used the definition of minimalist (a person who favors a moderate approach to the achievement of a set of goals) as a basis for my game. You play as the Minimalist in a seemingly normal platformer with very difficult or impossible levels. You must think of simple ways of beating the level with the least amount of work involved. You may attempt at beating the levels like a normal platformer but to win you must think outside of the box!